High Plains Gardening

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Lawns

Nothing says American landscape quite like the ubiquitous lawn. Certainly, lawns are desirable aspects to the home landscape. As with most plants, there are many ways to use and maintain turfgrass. Unfortunately, lawns too often lawns are over used are misused. A landscaping idea from another age and climate. If you're dissatisfied with the amount of water your lawn uses or how it performs, I hope to give some alternatives to improve your lawnscape. Since turf grass is so prevalent in the American Gardening Tradition, creating practical turf areas is one of the seven basic gardening principles.

Lawns have become an automatic reflex, a knee jerk reaction. We've come to view the lawn somewhat like carpet, a static, uniform covering over the exterior floor of our property. I don't think the concept of lawns is the problem, simply the way it's implemented.

The Texas Panhandle region is in a transition zone between cold and warm season grasses, therefore, there is no perfect turf grass. Each has their own set of virtues and disadvantages. Your choice may be a matter of water conservation, maintenance requirements or personal aesthetic preference. Traditional cool season grasses are varieties of Kentucky bluegrass, Poa pratensis, and turf type tall fescue, Festuca arundinacea. Our warm season turf grasses are usually a variety or hybrid of common Bermuda grass, Cynodon dactylon. A very low maintenance, low water use turf grass is our native buffalo grass, Buchloe dactyloides or one of its varieties or hybrids.

Many homeowners enlist the aid of lawn services or ask advice of the fellow who carries the fertilizer from the store to the car. Whether you hire out help or do it yourself, it's good to know what the best practices of lawn care actually are. Turfgrass, whatever the type, has particular perimeters under which it grows best. Once we know what they are, it'll be easier to care for it to its greater health.

Your entire landscape, including lawn areas, can be maintained in an manner that's in harmony with nature. Just because your choice might be a higher water-use variety, that doesn't mean fertilizers and other synthetic chemicals are required. And the good news is that organic products, by the bag, like fertilizer, is readily available. Water usage of the higher water-use turf will be reduced the organic way, and it will look better every year. A healthier lawn will survive those hot dry summers and cold dry winters in better shape as well.